The effect of ad blocking on user engagement with the web

Web users are increasingly turning to ad blockers to avoid ads, which are often perceived as annoying or an invasion of privacy. While there has been significant research into the factors driving ad blocker adoption and the detrimental effect to ad publishers on the Web, the resulting effects of ad blocker usage on Web users’ browsing experience is not well understood. To approach this problem, we conduct a retrospective natural field experiment using Firefox browser usage data, with the goal of estimating the effect of adblocking on user engagement with the Web. We focus on new users who installed an ad blocker after a baseline observation period, to avoid comparing different populations. Their subsequent browser activity is compared against that of a control group, whose members do not use ad blockers, over a corresponding observation period, controlling for prior baseline usage. In order to estimate causal effects, we employ propensity score matching on a number of other features recorded during the baseline period. In the group that installed an ad blocker, we find significant increases in both active time spent in the browser (+28% over control) and the number of pages viewed (+15% over control), while seeing no change in the number of searches. Additionally, by reapplying the same methodology to other popular Firefox browser extensions, we show that these effects are specific to ad blockers. We conclude that ad blocking has a positive impact on user engagement with the Web, suggesting that any costs of using ad blockers to users’ browsing experience are largely drowned out by the utility that they offer.

I, too, use ad blockers on all my browsers and devices – and I can safely say that if ad blockers didn’t exist, I’d be spending a lot less time reading websites online. Note that this study was performed by Mozilla employees.

About The Author

20 Comments

The potential problem I see to this is that, instead of the intended effect of ad companies deploying less intrusive ads, websites are moving to sponsored content, with all of the extra conflicts of interest that implies.

As an alternative, if sites have a Paypal or Donate button, you can put a little bit into their coffers. (Sometimes, the site will send you an email and offer you something, like a login without any ads.)

I do this for one site or app every month. Most free apps have a way for you to donate, but a lot of sites don’t. Why every site doesn’t have such a button is beyond me. Unless it costs a lot to maintain such a thing, it’s basically free money they’re throwing away.

For me it’s a security and privacy issue. I run pi.hole for my local network DNS. It does a surprisingly thorough job, though not as good as I’d like.

A few years ago the news was reporting how malware was being delivered by ad networks yet again. Then I got a strange ad that attempted to open a pop up (browser settings stopped it). That was it, I installed an ad blocker.

Later, as ad tracking starting getting more pervasive, and things I’d research for myself or others would start showing up in ads across various apps and web sites, I started getting more aggressive with blocking trackers as well.

Then I stumbled across pihole. Now I use that.

The funny thing is pihole disrupts so many things you start to see just how pervasive ads and tracking have become. And, some sites that use ad blocker detection also detect pihole. Only there’s no disabling it temporarily.

Just how pervasive are ads and tracking?

I have 3 people on my network, and probably 19 devices between servers, laptops, rokus, phones, and tablets. Age range represented is 11 to 72. In the last 24 hours 43,765 legitimate DNS queries made, 58,693 DNS queries blocked. And I know there are many, many, many more items that could be and should be blocked that are not yet blacklisted.

How sad is it that the ads and tracking exceed legitimate traffic to such a great degree?

How embarrasing can it be when your computer starts blaring in the office? Or in bed at night? And how expensive on a mobile connection?

Why is this tolerated?

I also dislike autoplay, especially on some sites where I want to read the text but not play the video. It’s great that the browser makers got video working in the browser but they haven’t given enough thought to those of us who don’t want autoplay. HTML5 was a good step away from proprietary flash plugins, yet at the same time it was a regression in terms of user control over multimedia. Flash content was simple to selectively enable/disable as desired. Not only did this prevent autoplay, but it also saved on bandwidth by stopping flash video downloads until you actually requested it.

It’s not that i’m against ads in general. Well placed and unintrusive ads are fine(OSNews for example). But the full banner ads that follow you when scrolling, big flashy animated ones, or god forbid the video ad, are so annoying and distracting, i’d rather go read the same article somewhere else. Intrusive ads actually put me off browsing websites sometimes.

Even Slashdot is fal;ling to the intrusive ad concept. If it wasn’t for ad blocker i’d probably stop reading slashdot.

Thom, you’re doing ads right, keep it up. To be honest you could even stick another in the sidebar and i wouldn’t worry.

The “control group” is not really a control group, is just a group of people who didn’t install ad-blockers. We don’t know why. Possible because they didn’t need them. Possible because they weren’t knowledgeable enough.

For the test to be scientific you would need both groups to be comprised of random samples of people.

The core of their methodology is flawed: the study looks at behaviour if new Firefox users. After a while, some of them install ad-blockers and also read more pages. While other group do not install ad-blockers and read less pages. You know, “power users” and “basic users”.

Advertising has gotten so far out of hand now that I completely despise it. I have zero interest in ANY of it. Not even funny stuff. It’s disgusting that unless you live in isolation in the forest, disconnected from civilization, you’re subjected to constant spamming day-in day-out be it mail, email, texts, phone calls, websites, tv, literally the tv, signage, or the front door to your damn house.

These days I’m as aggressive about blocking ads as advertisers are about spamming me with their crap. Any tolerance I used to have has been completely destroyed at this point. I no longer give 2 sh*ts about discerning between `good` and `bad` ads – screw them all and I don’t feel the least bit sorry for saying that.

Back when I bought a lot of print media (magazines mostly), I remember being engaged by the a lot of the ads. Whether it was an ad for some clutch covers in a motorcycle mag, or a new type of film in photography mags, or even somthing as ubiquitous (back then) as a rolling tobacco ad in the newspaper, I remember actually being interested in the products advertised and sometimes even purchasing them, or at least making the call to inquire about them.

I wonder if it has something to do with the print format. I can’t remember ever being as engaged with TV ads at the time, for instance. As for web ads, well, the less said the better, I suppose. Maybe it was just a smaller world back then and I had less on my mind. Dunno…

I don’t mind the old days when web advertising was mostly text with an accompanying static graphic. It was maybe 15 years ago when advertisers started adopting Flash and having ear-splitting audio and annoying, epilepsy-inducing video that I started looking for solutions to block the adverts. When I’m browsing the web, I don’t want the equivalent of a TV commercial shoved down my throat!